The Fugate family of Kentucky has had blue skin for centuries
allthatsinteresting.com
allthatsinteresting.com
For everyone that just wants to see the image
It spams back button history so quickly that you cannot return to HN anymore. Open in new tab if interested.
https://cdn.mutually.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2-9.jpg
If so, according to the family tree, this would be the last homozygous member of the Fugate family.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/internet-sensation-papa-smurf-...
The Fugate family has the methemoglobinemia condition. They can be 'cured' with methylene blue. The former could not.
It’s somewhat dishonest to illustrate an article on color with a photo that was colorized by someone we don’t know at an unknow date-- i.e. we don’t know anything about how they decided which shade of blue to apply on their faces. So the only interesting information caried by the photo, the shade of the blue color, has no source.
Also, this appears to be largely copied from this ABC News article: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-r...
https://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to-read-fonts-promote-better-re...
Even though it's taken from Wikipedia, they could have used a different one or recreated it. I was so confused while trying to decycpher that image.
Source: My family comes from Harlan, KY and I have Fugate relatives.
The doctor was so interested in her body's response he brought her in front of this university medical class. Apparently it's quite rare. It went away a week or so later.
(cant remember the name of the medication but it was certainly not a listed side effect).
Really? Within a few minutes??
Nitpick aside, such an interesting article! The world is such a big and interesting place!
It's a lot easier to treat someone when you can diagnose them at a glance.
The doctor would have to do a bit of research, but being such a rare symptom, achieving a diagnosis for blue skin would be much easier than reaching a single diagnosis from something like chest pain.
I wonder if someone is spinning me to finally take my driver's license.
Or are you implying he exists or existed for real independent of people’s psychotic heads?
Visual representations of him show him as blue for other reasons (mainly the comical stigma against dark skin).
I know the blue person in the image is not related to the article but it's interesting how the article is about blue people yet the "affected" result is shown as red.
Thanks for sharing, because it looks like it's not something I need to worry about because my blood quickly went back to red.
It's a bit hard to admit, but I'm really disappointed there isn't a picture of this.
I would have tought of it a fascinating and fashionable! Especially with white hair. Man, I want that when I am old!
And yeah, their ancestors might have been incestous. But that isn’t the childrens’ fault, now is it.
Man, … people somtimes.
Is that domain nomenclature? Because I wouldn't call having to be careful who procreate with otherwise risk losing 25% of my children from that relationship as "strictly superior"...
And this is based off the idea that for most of human history people have lived in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of people who lived died as children, and the predominate cause of death was Malaria.
In this case, the family had a hemoglobin variation, that resulted in a different kind of non-functional hemoglobin being produced. This hemoglobin has a blue tint. This, combined with their pale coloration, meant they had a blue tint.
This is not too dissimilar to how other hemoglobinopathies come about in nature. For example, the thallassemias and sickle cell anemia are two common hemoglobinopathies. Unlike the Fugate family's hemoglobinopathy, which likely did not provide any benefit, these two do provide some benefit to heterozygotes, and thus end up existing at a steady state in the population. The Fugate family's would likely disappear if it caused any issue in reproductive fitness (even a minor one), and the family reproduced among a sufficiently large population. However inbreeding combined with genetic drift means that there simply does not end up being a large enough population for the law of large numbers to take effect.
On the other hand, if the condition causes no reproductive fitness deficiency or increased reproductive ability, then the gene could potentially continue to exist in some very small number of the population. It could die out due to the simple fact of not having many affected people able to reproduce enough to make statistics matter.
That's a really insulting way to answer a question.
I get it, we like to look at situations where people are different, but does this actually inform, educate, or improve us by reading? Or is this article just a chance to point out some people who are different.
I've been thinking about this recently, and trying to moderate my curiosity (because blue skin certainly piques my curiosity) against what I'm trying to get out of the article and what the people in the article get out of the article. Is the Fugate's family improved by this? What about other people with methemoglobinemia? Are their lives improved?
Another way to think of it is, who benefits from this? Who is being put on display?
Edit: I ask because I think these are important questions to ask, and because I genuinely have a difficult time telling sometimes. It's useful to see responses of how others interpret this.
Do you think that was the intent of the author?
Alzheimer's, cancer, and other disease states are also hugely interesting. That's one of the reasons people study them (in addition to the desire to save and improve lives).
Human stories often intersect with biology. Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line...
Your critical thinking would be more useful in any other article that you believe does not match that standard.
I don't know about the Fugate's condition, but hemoglobinopathies are among the most common genetic diseases, and several are known to cause very severe symptoms when inherited in a dual-recessive fashion (like thalassemia and sickle cell anemia). It's unethical to conduct reproductive research on entire family lines, but when there is a pre-existing case study, one wonders what one could possibly learn about hemoglobin and why it seems to be a relatively dynamic protein. Just a thought as someone who does have a mild form of multiple thalassemias.
Further, this is an example of a rare genetic disease, of which there are thousands. However, instead of needing an expensive research project to find a cure, a simple off the shelf chemical will do. So if you are ever reading about "Orphan Drugs", you'll also have an example of a successfully treated rare genetic disease!